Text Blocks Are Way Faster As 'Anti-Alias For Readability' In Air for iOS

Ok. So this was my situation. I wanted to use Greensock’s Throwprops plugin on a big block of text on a static page to make it scroll. I got it working fine on the desktop. Export to the iPad and BAM 1fps! And that’s with the text just sitting there.

Then I tried caching it as a bitmap. It wouldn’t even display on the screen (presumably because the bitmap was too large).

Then I broke apart all the text (since Adobe Scout Heat Map shows text renders terribly slow on Air for iOS). That was just as slow as rendering the big text block.

Then, grasping at straws, I changed the text aliasing to ‘Anti-alias for Readability’. Wow. I’m up to 45fps! This was a shock since ‘Anti-alias for Animation’ was pretty much the standard go-to text render setting since the 1900’s. I had assumed that this legacy setting would be faster in any scenario. Wrong!

So, then I take my big long text block (which I have inside a movieclip) and break it up by paragraph and I get 60fps! I broke it up thinking that perhaps text is rendered by block (which seems to be the case) so that off-screen blocks don’t need to get rendered. That seems to have worked. With Throwprops working on it, I get >55fps. I can live with that.

Conclusion: If you have to have text blocks in Air for iOS, ‘Anti-alias for Readability’ is way faster than ‘Anti-alias for Animation’ which is just about unusable.